Book Review: “Nepantla Familias” and the Power of Storytelling
Nepantla Familias explores life in the liminal spaces between borders. The essays, poems, and short stories in this anthology, all by Mexican American writers, present the conflicts — internal and external — that occur in these spaces between nations, cultures, and languages. They raise questions like: How does someone who straddles two worlds fit into either? Is it possible to live in both? What is lost when someone chooses, or is forced to choose, one world over the other? The answers vary, but in the attempts to find them, a main theme emerges: the power of storytelling to work through pain and forge identity.
Nepantla is a Nahuatl word that was used by the Aztecs to refer to a middle ground, a state of being in-between. In the book’s first essay, “Here, There,” David Dorado Romo writes that the term “literally means ‘a mutual place’” (8). But what is “mutual” in this “place” varies. Sometimes it’s respect, sometimes love. Sometimes it’s fear, ignorance, or animosity. Usually, it’s all these things and more at once. The people and characters in Nepantla Familias find themselves having to navigate these mutualities, often alone, without support from their communities.
The challenges aren’t limited to lack of support. They’re frequently made worse by spiteful nativism. Reyna Grande, in “Losing My Mother Tongue,” tells of how, after she came to the US as a child, her teacher placed her in “the farthest corner of the classroom and…ignored [her] for the rest of the year” because she knew no English. The lesson was obvious: “I am not enough. I am insufficient” (27). To become a person in this new world, she’d need to speak and write its language. (Her story submission was rejected from a school competition because she wrote it in Spanish.) Until she learned English, she would remain invisible. In becoming visible, though, the language of her birth faded from view. But as an adult, she made sure this didn’t happen to her daughter, who learned both tongues.
Other writers mix Spanish and English in ways that sometimes punctuate acts of independence and defiance. Sandra Cisneros’ “Jarcería Shop” sees the poet purchasing items, including “a few of those carrizo,” “an ocote stick or two,” “molcajete,” and “ixtile,” as well as “a bucket.” She wants to use the latter to clean her “Mexican porch tiles” on her “housekeeper’s day off.” This act, she writes, will “set the grandmothers [to] / [g]rinding their gravestone teeth” (136–139). In Helena María Viramontes’ short story “The Surprise Trancazo,” V. Rocha stands up to and fights the three drunken Navy “cabronazos” who’ve accosted him in the street. He’s soon arrested by a “pinchi chota” (“fucking corrupt cop”) and taken away to the police station, bloodied and battered, but not defeated.
A similar resilience permeates the pages of this book. “Elote Man,” an essay by teacher David Dominguez, is about how he was mistaken for a gardener, contractor, solely English speaker, and finally as an “elote man,” or corn vendor. Reminded of his hero as a child, former Dodgers’ pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, Dominguez decides, “I’m going to be happy with who I am at this very moment” (103). Sheryl Luna’s “The Hole in the House” makes clear the writer’s belief “in the reversals of grief and loss,” which she came to after years of struggle with her mother’s mental illness — and her own — and her stepfather’s having raped her as a child (119, 112). A literal hole in her mother’s house represents so much more than empty space. But in trauma and struggle lie the roots of growth.
No piece illustrates this better than “Letter to the Student Who Asks Me How I Managed to Do It” by José Antonio Rodríguez. Forced to hide his immigration status in school and, later, his sexuality at work, Rodríguez is hired by the FBI as a Spanish transcriber of calls the agency believes were made by drug dealers. After he quits, he finds work telling people in Spanish that their utilities will be cut off if they don’t pay the bills. One must take jobs like these on the road to achieving “the American Dream,” but after a while, Rodríguez starts asking whether that, and going by “Joe,” is what he wants his future to look like. It’s not until he breaks down and attends a workshop in poetry that he introduces himself as José for the first time in years. The workshop’s setting, “a conference room of the local university library,” and the prospect of writing give him real hope. Through writing he realizes that
every ending is also a beginning, if you wait it out long enough. I no longer believe I escape the past unscathed. In fact, I know that I didn’t, that I carry the past with me, that we all do. And that the trauma in it haunts me and that to ignore that, to pretend it away, won’t work. But if I find meaning in it, if I learn from that meaning, this too can be beauty. (127)
In writing our stories, we create meaning and beauty, but also identity. The same thing happens when we read them and see our own reflections, even in storytellers who seem so different from us on the surface.
This, I think, is why Sergio Troncoso, the editor of Nepantla Familias, writes in the introduction that nepantla is “a deeply universal experience” (2). In the U.S. and across the world, we seem intent on reinforcing man-made borders, physical or otherwise. The voices in this book, speaking from the liminal spaces between them, bear witness to the pain and loss these boundaries inflict. But they also prove that borders, no matter the height of their walls, are fragile and impermanent. In the end, the fight to keep them up is futile.
